Revue of Reviewers, 1-30-19

Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.

Calendar of Crime

Killer Covers’ 10th birthday party will end tomorrow, when it posts the 12th in its succession of book fronts bearing titles that include the names of months. Catch up with the whole series here.

Morse and the Mustache

With the short, four-episode sixth season of ITV’s Endeavour set to debut in the UK on Sunday, February 10, a one-minute trailer has surfaced online. It doesn’t give too many clues as to where this prequel to the Inspector Morse series, starring Shaun Evans and Roger Allam, might be headed in 2019. But Radio Times offers this bit:

A glance at the first picture of Endeavour series six … reveals at least one major change for the new series—you don’t have to be eagle-eyed to spot Shaun Evans’ significant facial furniture, perhaps signifying the move towards the 1970s (the new series is set in 1969).

Naturally, DC [George] Fancy’s death looms over the characters as [DI Fred] Thursday adjusts to working with new boss DI Ronnie Box (Simon Harrison) and junior DS Alan Jago (Richard Riddell). Meanwhile, Thursday’s daughter Joan (whom Endeavour is in love with [and who is portrayed by Sara Vickers]) is training to work in social services in Oxford under the mentorship of new boss Viv Wall (Alison Newman).

While its fast-rolling clips are promising, the very best thing about this trailer may be its background song: 1968’s “The Windmills of Your Mind,” with music by the recently deceased French composer Michel Legrand and lyrics written by Americans Alan and Marilyn Bergman. That same song was used in the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. Click here to listen to Noel Harrison’s version.

There’s no word yet on when Endeavour will return to PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! series in the States. Let’s hope it’s soon.

What Would Agatha Say?

Organizers of the annual Malice Domestic conference have announced the finalists for this year’s Agatha Awards. The names of winning works and authors will be declared on May 4, during Malice Domestic 31, set to be held in Bethesda, Maryland, from May 3 to 5.

Best Contemporary Novel:
• Mardi Gras Murder, by Ellen Byron (Crooked Lane)
• Beyond the Truth, by Bruce Robert Coffin (Witness Impulse)
• Cry Wolf, by Annette Dashofy (Henery Press)
• Kingdom of the Blind, by Louise Penny (Minotaur)
• Trust Me, by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Forge)

Best Historical Novel:
• Four Funerals and Maybe a Wedding, by Rhys Bowen (Berkley)
• The Gold Pawn, by L.A. Chandlar (Kensington)
• The Widows of Malabar Hill, by Sujata Massey (Soho Crime)
• Turning the Tide, by Edith Maxwell (Midnight Ink)
• Murder on Union Square, by Victoria Thompson (Berkley)

Best First Novel:
• A Lady’s Guide to Etiquette and Murder, by Dianne Freeman (Kensington)
• Little Comfort, by Edwin Hill (Kensington)
• What Doesn’t Kill You, by Aimee Hix (Midnight Ink)
• Deadly Solution, by Keenan Powell (Level Best)
• Curses Boiled Again, by Shari Randall (St. Martin’s Press)

Best Short Story:
• “All God’s Sparrows,” by Leslie Budewitz (Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine [AHMM], May/June 2018)
• “A Postcard for the Dead,” by Susanna Calkins (from Florida Happens, edited by Greg Herren; Three Rooms Press)
• “Bug Appetit,” by Barb Goffman (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine [EQMM], November/December 2018)
• “The Case of the Vanishing Professor,” by Tara Laskowski (AHMM, May/June 2018)
• “English 398: Fiction Workshop,” by Art Taylor (EQMM,
July/August 2018)

Best Young Adult Mystery:
• Potion Problems (Just Add Magic), by Cindy Callaghan (Aladdin)
• Winterhouse, by Ben Guterson (Henry Holt)
• A Side of Sabotage, by C.M. Surrisi (Carolrhoda)

Best Non-fiction:
• Mastering Plot Twists: How to Use Suspense, Targeted Storytelling Strategies, and Structure to Captivate Your Readers, by Jane Cleland (Writer’s Digest Books)
• Writing the Cozy Mystery, by Nancy J. Cohen (Orange Grove Press)
• Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World’s Most Famous Detective Writer, by Margalit Fox (Random House)
• Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life, by Laura Thompson
(Pegasus Books)
• Wicked Women of Ohio, by Jane Ann Turzillo (History Press)

Best of luck to all the nominees!

PaperBack: “Two to Tangle”

Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.



Two to Tangle, by Frank Kane (Dell, 1965), one of the last books in the Johnny Liddell private-eye series. Cover art by Ron Lesser.

Deserving of Edgars Attention

January had already brought us the lists of nominees for 2019’s Lefty Awards and Barry Awards. Now the Mystery Writers of America announces the rivals for this year’s coveted Edgar Awards.

Best Novel:
• The Liar’s Girl, by Catherine Ryan Howard (Blackstone)
• House Witness, by Mike Lawson (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• A Gambler’s Jury, by Victor Methos (Thomas & Mercer)
• Down the River Unto the Sea, by Walter Mosley (Mulholland)
• Only to Sleep, by Lawrence Osborne (Hogarth)
• A Treacherous Curse, by Deanna Raybourn (Berkley)

Best First Novel by an American Author:
• A Knife in the Fog, by Bradley Harper (Seventh Street)
• The Captives, by Debra Jo Immergut (Ecco)
• The Last Equation of Isaac Severy, by Nova Jacobs (Touchstone)
• Bearskin, by James A. McLaughlin (Ecco)
• Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens (Putnam)

Best Paperback Original:
• If I Die Tonight, by Alison Gaylin (Morrow)
• Hiroshima Boy, by Naomi Hirahara (Prospect Park)
• Under a Dark Sky, by Lori Rader-Day (Morrow)
• The Perfect Nanny, by Leila Slimani (Penguin)
• Under My Skin, by Lisa Unger (Park Row)

Best Fact Crime:
• Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge First and the Rise of Gay Liberation, by Robert W. Fieseler (Liveright)
• Sex Money Murder: A Story of Crack, Blood, and Betrayal,
by Jonathan Green (Norton)
• The Last Wild Men of Borneo: A True Story of Death and Treasure, by Carl Hoffman (Morrow)
• The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century, by Kirk Wallace Johnson (Viking)
• I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, by Michelle McNamara (Harper)
• The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took on the World’s Most Powerful Mafia, by Alex Perry (Morrow)

Best Critical/Biographical:
• The Metaphysical Mysteries of G.K. Chesterton: A Critical Study of the Father Brown Stories and Other Detective Fiction, by Laird R. Blackwell (McFarland)
• Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession,
by Alice Bolin (Morrow)
• Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s, annotated by Leslie S. Klinger (Pegasus Books)
• Mark X: Who Killed Huck Finn’s Father? by Yasuhiro
Takeuchi (Routledge)
• Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life, by Laura Thompson (Pegasus)

Best Short Story:
• “Rabid,“ by Paul Doiron (Minotaur e-book)
• “Paranoid Enough for Two,” by John Lutz (from The Havana
Game; Kensington)
• “Ancient and Modern,” by Val McDermid (from Bloody Scotland, edited by James Crawford; Pegasus)
• “English 398: Fiction Workshop,” by Art Taylor (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, July/August 2018)
• “The Sleep Tight Motel,” by Lisa Unger (Amazon e-book)

Best Juvenile:
• Denis Ever After, by Tony Abbott (Katherine Tegen)
• Zap! by Martha Freeman (Paula Wiseman)
• Ra the Mighty: Cat Detective, by A.B. Greenfield (Holiday House)
• Winterhouse, by Ben Guterson (Henry Holt)
• Otherwood, by Pete Hautman (Candlewick Press)
• Charlie & Frog, by Karen Kane (Disney Hyperion)
• Zora & Me: The Cursed Ground, by T.R. Simon (Candlewick Press)

Best Young Adult:
• Contagion, by Erin Bowman (HarperCollins)
• Blink, by Sasha Dawn (Carolrhoda Lab)
• After the Fire, by Will Hill (Sourcebooks Fire)
• A Room Away from the Wolves, by Nova Ren Suma (Algonquin)
• Sadie, by Courtney Summers (Wednesday)

Best Television Episode Teleplay:
• “The Box,” Brooklyn Nine-Nine, teleplay by Luke Del Tredici (NBC/Universal TV)
• “Season 2, Episode 1,” Jack Irish, teleplay by Andrew Knight
(Acorn TV)
• “Episode 1,” Mystery Road, teleplay by Michaeley O’Brien (Acorn TV)
• “My Aim Is True,” Blue Bloods, teleplay by Kevin Wade
(CBS Eye Productions)
• “The One That Holds Everything,” The Romanoffs, teleplay by Matthew Weiner and Donald Joh (Amazon Prime Video)

Robert L. Fish Memorial Award:
“How Does He Die This Time?” by Nancy Novick (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September/October 2018)

The Simon & Schuster Mary Higgins Clark Award:
• A Death of No Importance, by Mariah Fredericks (Minotaur)
• A Lady’s Guide to Etiquette and Murder, by Dianne Freeman (Kensington)
• Bone on Bone, by Julia Keller (Minotaur)
• The Widows of Malabar Hill, by Sujata Massey (Soho Crime)
• A Borrowing of Bones, by Paula Munier (Minotaur)

Winners are set to be announced during a “gala banquet” on April 25, in New York City. Congratulations to all of this year’s contenders.

(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

Barrys Squeak Out Ahead

With the Mystery Writers of America set to make public its nominations for the 2019 Edgar Awards tomorrow, January 22, I’d assumed that all other prize-presenting organizations would avoid overlapping announcements. But I was wrong. As Mystery Fanfare notes, Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine today declared the contenders for its latest Barry Awards. They are:

Best Novel:
• November Road, by Lou Berney (Morrow)
• Dark Sacred Night, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
• The Shadows We Hide, by Allen Eskens (Mulholland)
• Depth of Winter, by Craig Johnson (Viking)
• Leave No Trace, by Mindy Mejia (Atria)
• A Necessary Evil, by Abir Mukherjee (Pegasus)

Best First Novel:
• My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Doubleday)
• Need to Know, by Karen Cleveland (Ballantine)
• Dodging and Burning, by John Copenhaver (Pegasus)
• Sweet Little Lies, by Caz Frear (Harper)
• Bearskin, by James A. McLaughlin (Ecco)
• The Chalk Man, by C.J. Tudor (Crown)

Best Paperback Original:
• A Sharp Solitude, by Christine Carbo (Atria)
• Dead Pretty, by David Mark (Blue Rider Press)
• The Ruin, by Dervla McTiernan (Penguin)
• The Hollow of Fear, by Sherry Thomas (Berkley)
• Resurrection Bay, by Emma Viskic (Pushkin Vertigo)

Best Thriller:
• The Terminal List, by Jack Carr (Atria)
• Safe Houses, by Dan Fesperman (Knopf)
• London Rules, by Mick Herron (Soho)
• Forever and a Day, by Anthony Horowitz (Harper)
• Light It Up, by Nick Petrie (Putnam)
• The King Tides, by James Swain (Thomas & Mercer)

Winners will be proclaimed and awards handed ’round during the opening night ceremonies at this year’s Bouchercon in Dallas, on October 31. The Texas setting has some significance, for as the old Mystery News explained, the Barry Awards are named in honor of Barry Gardner, a longtime “friend of mystery fiction,” who died “while reading in his easy chair at his Dallas home on July 19, 1996.”

Revue of Reviewers, 1-20-19

Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.

Not Just Enduring, but Influential

Several crime and thriller dramas appear among the “25 Greatest Classic TV Series,” as chosen by the Classic TV Blog Association. Occupying the spot at No. 25 is The Avengers, while Hill Street Blues is ranked at No. 22. Also featured on this list: Perry Mason (18), The Defenders (16), The Fugitive (12), The Prisoner (9), Dragnet (6), and Columbo (4). So what did this online group decide was the top classic small-screen show? Why, The Twilight Zone (1959-1964).

12 Months, 12 Fronts

Yesterday marked the official 10th birthday of our sister blog, Killer Coves. However, the celebration will continue for the next week and a half, as Killer Covers goes about posting “a year’s worth of books bearing titles that include the names of months—our own ‘calendar of crime,’ if you will.” Click here to keep up with the whole series.

Treasures from the Genre’s Past

Two rather ambitious blog series have been launched of late, and promise to be with us for some while to come. If you have not already noticed these, you really should start paying attention.

Criminal Element is looking back at the last 64 years worth of books that have received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel from the Mystery Writers of America. Its series opened with Joe Brosnan revisiting the competition’s very first winner, in 1954: Beat Not the Bones, by Charlotte Jay, which he says is “surprisingly modern” and “undeniably a mystery novel, but … also doubles as an early example of anticolonial literature.” In the series’ second installment, Adam Wagner—who’d apparently never read one of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe detective novels before now—considers the virtues and weaknesses of The Long Goodbye, which captured the Edgar in 1955. Among the books still to be considered are (in order of their Edgar victories) Margaret Millar’s Beast in View, Charlotte Armstrong’s A Dram of Poison, Ed Lacy’s Room to Swing, and one of my favorite private-eye novels, Stanley Ellin’s The Eighth Circle. You should be able to keep track of all Criminal Element’s Edgar posts here.

Concurrently, New York City bookstore owner, anthologist, and critic Otto Penzler is re-examining—for CrimeReads—what he maintains are the 107 “Greatest Crime Films of All-Time.” First up was Sleuth (1972), followed shortly by A Shot in the Dark (1964), Seven (1995), Dead End (1937), No Country for Old Men (2007), and Foreign Correspondent (1940). Only 101 selections to go, and I’m expecting to read about—and be enticed to see—more movies I haven’t already watched. Click here to find all of Penzler’s picks.

Leftys Honor Writing

Organizers of Left Coast Crime 2019, “Whale of a Crime,” the convention scheduled to be held in Vancouver, British Columbia, from March 28 to 31, today announced their nominees in four different categories of Lefty Awards. They are:

Lefty for Best Humorous Mystery Novel:
• Mardi Gras Murder, by Ellen Byron (Crooked Lane)
• Hollywood Ending, by Kellye Garrett (Midnight Ink)
• Nighttown, by Timothy Hallinan (Soho Crime)
• Death al Fresco, by Leslie Karst (Crooked Lane)
• The Spirit in Question, by Cynthia Kuhn (Henery Press)
• Scot Free, by Catriona McPherson (Midnight Ink)

Lefty for Best Historical Mystery Novel (Bruce Alexander Memorial), for books covering events before 1960:
• Four Funerals and Maybe a Wedding, by Rhys Bowen
(Berkeley Prime Crime)
• The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday,
by David Corbett (Black Opal)
• Island of the Mad, by Laurie R. King (Bantam)
• The Widows of Malabar Hill, by Sujata Massey (Soho Crime)
• A Dying Note, by Ann Parker (Poisoned Pen Press)
• It Begins in Betrayal, by Iona Whishaw (Touchwood Editions)

Lefty for Best Debut Mystery Novel:
• Broken Places, by Tracy Clark (Kensington)
• Cobra Clutch, by A.J. Devlin (NeWest Press)
• The Woman in the Window, by A.J. Finn (Morrow)
• A Lady’s Guide to Etiquette and Murder,
by Dianne Freeman (Kensington)
• What Doesn’t Kill You, by Aimee Hix (Midnight Ink)
• Deadly Solution, by Keenan Powell (Level Best)
• Give Out Creek, by J.G. Toews (Mosaic Press)

Lefty for Best Mystery Novel (not in other categories):
• November Road, by Lou Berney (Morrow)
• Wrong Light, by Matt Coyle (Oceanview)
• Kingdom of the Blind, by Louise Penny (Minotaur)
• Under a Dark Sky, by Lori Rader-Day (Morrow)
• A Reckoning in the Back Country, by Terry Shames (Seventh Street)
• A Stone’s Throw, by James W. Ziskin (Seventh Street)

According to a press release, “The awards will be voted on at the convention and presented at a banquet on Saturday, March 30 …” This year’s Guests of Honor are authors C.J. Box and Maureen Jennings, with William Deverell to be honored as the Local Legend.

Still a Source of Macabre Curiosity

It was 72 years ago today, on January 15, 1947, that the victim of one of the most notorious unsolved murders in the long history of Los Angeles, California, was discovered. She was a 22-year-old New England-born waitress, Elizabeth Short, who is best remembered by a nickname of disputed provenance: the Black Dahlia.

I wrote about her slaying and the subsequent decades of its mythologizing two years ago on this page, in association with the 70th anniversary of the crime. More recently, though, retired Los Angeles Times reporter Larry Harnisch has been revisiting Short’s case and the all-too-frequently flawed record of its details in his L.A. history blog, The Daily Mirror. Here, for instance, Harnisch cites “five obvious errors” made by modern writers attempting to recall that case. In two other posts—here and here—he considers the question, “Are There Any Good Books on the Black Dahlia Case?” His conclusion: “No. But there are a lot of really, really bad ones and you should avoid them all or you will just have to unlearn everything. And your head may explode from all the nonsense.” Meanwhile, in a couple of other blog posts—accessible here and here—Harnisch considers a parallel query: “Are There Any Good Black Dahlia Sites on the Internet?” Again, it’s probably best to lower your expectations. And in this post, Harnisch debunks talk of Short having met her death at the hands of physician George H. Hodel, a theory promulgated by Hodel’s own son, Steve, in his 2003 book, Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder.

Harnisch is said to be working on his own history of the Black Dahlia. We can only to see it before too much more time has passed.

READ MORE: “January 15, 1947: A Werewolf on the Loose,” by Joan Renner (Deranged L.A. Crimes); “Black Dahlia: Common Myths About the Black Dahlia and Their Origins,” by Larry Harnisch (The Daily Mirror); “Black Dahlia: Complete Guide on Elizabeth Short, Related Books and Movies” (Mystery Tribune).

Perry, P.I.?

It seems that 44-year-old Welsh actor Matthew Rhys, who starred in the period spy drama The Americans, is in line to become television’s next Perry Mason. The Hollywood Reporter says he’ll step into the polished shoes originally reserved for Robert Downey Jr., who had long hoped to portray Erle Stanley Gardner’s phenomenally successful Los Angeles defense attorney on the small screen, but had to bow out of the opportunity due to a packed schedule of conflicting obligations. Downey will, nonetheless, “remain on board as an executive producer on the [HBO] series,” according to the Reporter.

Now for the bad news: HBO plans to turn Mason into a figure more akin to Philip Marlowe, or Paul Drake, than to Gardner’s famously sly and savvy counselor-at-law. Again, from the Reporter:

... HBO’s Perry Mason will follow the character at a time in his life when he is living check-to-check as a low-rent private investigator. Mason is haunted by his wartime experiences in France and is suffering the effects of a broken marriage. …

Here's the official logline, from HBO: “1932, Los Angeles. While the rest of the country recovers from the Great Depression, this city is booming! Oil! Olympic Games! Talking Pictures! Evangelical Fervor! And a child kidnapping gone very, very wrong! Based on characters created by Erle Stanley Gardner, this limited series follows the origins of American Fiction’s most legendary criminal defense lawyer, Perry Mason. When the case of the decade breaks down his door, Mason’s relentless pursuit of the truth reveals a fractured city and just maybe, a pathway to redemption for himself.”

Well, it’s true that Mason was more physical, fast-fisted, and daring in his younger days, more of a pulp hero than he became in Gardner’s later books. He wasn’t above punching a guy who dared to threaten his clever secretary, Della Street, and in one story leapt from window sill to window sill of a tall building in an effort to advance his defense of a client. “And, in a supreme moment of confidence,” Otto Penzler wrote in his 1977 history, The Private Lives of Private Eyes, Spies, Crime Fighters and Other Good Guys, “he stands his ground and stares down a gorilla which has just attacked him.” (The reference there is to 1952’s The Case of the Grinning Gorilla.)

But is it really necessary to turn Mason into a gumshoe in order to reintroduce him to modern TV audiences? I object!

READ MORE: “Matthew Rhys Will Star in HBO’s Perry Mason Remake,” by Josef Adalian (Vulture/New York).

Death in Alaska’s Jewish Sanctuary

Since I greatly enjoyed the 2007 detective novel that serves as this coming program’s inspiration, I look forward to seeing the results of CBS’ efforts. From In Reference to Murder:

CBS TV Studios is developing a TV series project based on Michael Chabon’s alternative history book, [The] Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The story follows Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe who found unlikely refuge on the Alaskan panhandle. In the present day of this world, Homicide Detective Meyer Landsman must overcome the shambles of his broken life and marriage to solve a mysterious murder with profound political and religious ramifications.

Deadline Hollywood says Chabon will executive produce the series, along with his wife, Ayelet Waldman. It adds: “The project will be taken out shortly to premium cable and streaming networks.”

PaperBack: “Congo Song”

Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.



Congo Song, by Stuart Cloete (Monarch Giants, 1958).
Cover illustration by Harry Schaare.

Delight or Disappointment?

Tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT, HBO will premiere the third season of its Nic Pizzolatto-created anthology crime series, True Detective, and reviews have been rather mixed. Vox, for instance, has this to say:

In many ways, season three feels like season one with the latter’s more idiosyncratic edges sanded off. There are hints of some terrible horror lurking in the heart of Southern rural America (in this case via the form of strange dolls that keep turning up at the scenes of children’s murders and disappearances). There's a fascination with how systemic corruption approaches the level of Lovecraftian horror. There are long, philosophical ramblings in cop cars. …

But season three is bolstered by centralizing just one character instead of a duo. As Wayne Hays, Mahershala Ali commands the story’s center—he’s the one character who is consistently presented across all three timelines—and creates a mesmerizing portrait of a man cracking apart under his glimpses at true inhumanity.

Meanwhile, the entertainment Web site Collider opines:

Each episode ends with a very fine cliffhanger, but the overall pace is slow and rich, building an interesting, layered, and very personal story. The turning points of the case aren’t dragged out—there’s no time, so the narrative dolls things out at a reasonable pace—and T Bone Burnett’s soundtrack is again a perfect, twangy accompaniment that sets a gloomy, uneasy mood. It may not be as arresting or iconic as the first season, but time is a flat circle. True Detective has come back around with a true return to form.

(Collider has also posted a good interview with series creator Nic Pizzolatto and star Mahershala Ali, which you can enjoy here.)

Finally, Salon’s Melanie McFarland serves up some contrary views:

Laced throughout these new “True Detective” episodes are replays of first season details, down to the creepy sculptures left by crime scenes; this time it’s corn husk dolls instead of sticks held together with mud and hair and who knows what else.

The plot’s framework may be a retread, but those who kept the faith through the three-and-a-half-year gap between the disastrous season 2 and this new story may be heartened by its intentional recall to the [Matthew] McConaughey-[Woody] Harrelson chapter. If this is Pizzolatto asking for a do-over, Ali’s smolder lends the writer enough currency to buy at least a few hours of patience.

But from there it’s hard to definitively characterize this season as more of a success than the season it resembles most.

Mind you, one lesson Pizzolatto seems to have learned (somewhat) is that he’s given the piece at least one woman who is a fully realized human being and not simply a cipher waiting to be completed or broken by a male hero, or a female character who might as well be a guy, as Rachel McAdams played her role in season 2.

Ali and [Carmen] Ejogo [who plays his school teacher wife] have stronger chemistry here than Ali and [Stephen] Dorff [who appears as his partner, Roland West], and that seems to be a purposeful choice and, given Dorff’s more limited dramatic range, the right one.

But this is still Nic Pizzolatto after all, which means the other significant female role, that of Mamie Gummer’s Lucy Purcell, is a screaming harpy who, in one scene, declares that she knows she has the “soul of a whore.” And maybe that wouldn’t be so vexing from another auteur creator. A better one wouldn’t make Ali sell a recollection’s permanence by explaining he remembers the date the kids went missing because it happened on the same day Steve McQueen died. I’m not saying that note is implausible, but that regardless of how smoothly Ali delivers that line it might as well be spilling out of Pizzolatto’s mouth; in the context of the series, it's a too-obvious flourish of ersatz cool.

At the very least Ali’s muscular performance, and that of Scoot McNairy as the bereaved father of the missing kids, earn the show a little more rope at the end of each episode.

Nevertheless it’s tough to shake the sense that the third outing for “True Detective” could leave us with as much of a contentment gap as the close of the Rusty and Marty chronicles. Circling back is a fine plan, especially given the amount of time that has gone by. But if the action spins off into nothing again at the end of this Lazarus act, and after so much hype, I suspect fewer people will be jonesing to re-open the case again.

Let us know what you think of the new True Detective after you’ve had a chance to screen and consider Episode 1.

READ MORE: “True Detective: The Crucial Literary Allusions You Might Have Missed in the Premiere,” by Joanna Robinson (Vanity Fair); “Review: True Detective (S3 E1&2),” by Andy D. (The Killing Times).

Puzzling Out Mysteries

Back in early December of last year, I submitted to CrimeReads an assigned piece about Dell Books’ Murder Ink/Scene of the Crime series from the 1980s. Thanks to the subsequent holiday hoopla, however, it’s only today that the piece has finally been posted.

What, you don’t remember Dell’s series? It consisted of mystery-fiction paperback reprints, and was launched in the fall of 1980. As I explain in my piece, the project was steered by a pair of then-well-known bookstore proprietors: “Carol Brener, who owned the landmark Murder Ink bookshop, established in 1972 on New York City’s Upper West Side, and Ruth Windfeldt, the proprietor of Scene of the Crime, another popular haunt for mystery-fiction enthusiasts, opened in 1975 in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles. Each of those women was asked to pick half a dozen titles every year—all of which had previously appeared in hardcover—that they believed deserved reprinting.”

Although the line lasted only a few years, it drew considerable attention with the quality of its cozy-ish selections, which included Sheila Radley’s Death in the Morning, A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery, Mignon Warner’s The Tarot Murders, and Robert Barnard’s Death on the High C’s. But the books were also recognized for their distinctive, uniform design. “[T]he fronts of these works were principally white,” I write, “with single jigsaw puzzle pieces positioned below the author’s byline and the book’s title. The gimmick was that those oddly configured fragments fit into fuller illustrations on the backsides of the books (though they were usually enlarged for easier readability). So you had to flip each volume over not only to read the plot précis, but to appreciate the complete artwork.”

My shelves still contain a few dozen of the Murder Ink/Scene of the Crime titles, and while researching this piece, I managed to speak with several people who were involved on the editorial and art side of the project. Again, you’ll find my full CrimeReads piece here.

Revue of Reviewers, 1-10-19

Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.